Can I safely unplug internal sata 3 drive from motherboard when Windows 7 running?

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Asquirrel

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Mar 18, 2015
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Hi Folks. I have a MSI Z77A-G45 LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with UEFI BIOS motherboard that I bought from Newegg a few years ago. I just bought a TOSHIBA PH3300U-1I72 3TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Retail Kit from Newegg last week.
In my bios I have ACHI enabled. The drive is formatted in NTFS and then I put Truecrypt over the whole partition.

I'm wondering if there is a way I can safely remove this drive and swap it out for another drive While Window 7 64 bit is running. I've unmounted the Truecrypt volume.

I right clicked on the task bar where it says safely remove hardware / eject media but it says the drive is currently in use.

Can I just unplug the Sata power cable from the drive and wait for it to power down and then unplug the data cable? Thanks for your help!
 
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norsestar

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Apr 8, 2014
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Hotplugging SATA may have to be enabled in BIOS, after which the drive should be listed in Safely Remove Hardware. You want to pull the plug on an internal HDD while the machine is still running? Is this in a hot-swap bay or something?

I get the same Device In Use message sometimes when trying to remove a USB hard drive after dismounting the TrueCrypt container. The drive's activity light is off, so I don't think it's still doing anything. Exiting out of TrueCrypt altogether sometimes helps (right-click on the TrueCrypt icon in the system tray and select Exit; this won't work if you've encrypted the system drive). I have just pulled the plug on it at this point anyway and seen no ill effects but I don't think this qualifies as "safely" removing it.
 
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